BLOOD FROM A STONE
After years of thought-provoking filmmaking, Oliver Stone is sharing the behind-the-scenes struggles of his personal life and career in a new memoir. Here he tells Tymon Smith about ‘Chasing The Light’
It’s a few weeks after his 74th birthday when director Oliver Stone’s distinctive drawl comes onto the Zoom call. He is speaking from Los Angeles, on what the director of films such as Platoon , Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK , Natural Born Killers , Nixon and, most recently, Snowden , describes as a beautiful day. “Blue skies, no fires.” Stone seems cheerful, relaxed and eager to talk about his newest project.
That project is not a new feature film about a US president, or a documentary about one of the US’s many public enemies — Castro, Hugo Chávez or Vladimir Putin, all of whom Stone has interviewed and made films about. Nor is it a continuation of his mammoth 12-episode 2012 series The
Untold History of the United States, produced in collaboration with historian Peter Kuznick.
Rather, after years of making his career as a determinedly political filmmaker with a burning curiosity for what many have lazily written off as conspiracy theories, Stone has turned his attention to his most mystifying and complicated subject yet — himself, in his recently published memoir Chasing The Light .
The book, while peppered with the kind of on-set, behind-the-scenes details that film fans will eagerly gobble up, is also an engaging, empathetic and honest piece of self-examination. It weaves its Bildungsroman narrative of a young, white and relatively privileged post-war American’s journey from the fragile middleclass fairy tale of his youth through to the shattering of that dream through his parents’ divorce to his volunteering for service in the Vietnam War.
That experience leads to the building of a consciousness that questions established ideas and leads him into the treacherous world of Hollywood where he finds some early success, develops some bad habits, falls from favour and manages to re-emerge by the age of 40 as the Oscar-winning director of Platoon . That film was a longdreamt-of drama about the Vietnam War based on his personal experience that would set him on a winning streak of distinctive, ambitious films that have earned him his own adjective in the filmmaking universe.
As Stone sees it, Chasing the Light is more a memoir than a history — “In the sense that you’re really engaging with the unmaterial things such as spirit, character, life choices, what happened with your parents and your wives and your choices in life — and it really makes you re-examine everything.”
Central to the narrative of the mythological quest of the memoir’s central character is the pivotal plot point of his parents’ divorce. Stone, who was 16 at the time, now sees this event as having affected him painfully personally. “It also affected my way of seeing the world, which is to doubt things, doubt the surface of things.”
A SHATTERED FAIRY TALE
Stone’s father was a World War 2 soldier and, later, Eisenhower Republican who met his French wife in France in the last year of the war. The couple married, and their only child, apple of his French grandmother’s eye, Oliver was born in 1946. Stone grew up believing that his parents epitomised the happy, post-war-boom-era US couple, only to have that illusion shattered when, while at boarding school in 1962, he received a phone call from his father telling him of the divorce. He learnt that his parents had both been less than perfect — conducting affairs and struggling to overcome the glaring differences between them while sheltering their son from the truth. As he looks through the narratively satisfying lens of hindsight, Stone believes that his parents wove a fairy tale. “And I don’t blame them for it, that’s the nature of parents,” he says. “But they couldn’t live up to it and when it fell apart it was ugly.”
In 1963, during his final year of high school, Stone, along with millions of griefstricken Americans, watched the news of the assassination of John F Kennedy. He writes that he felt stunned, “understanding nothing but the surface of things, the explanations handed down to us by our chief priests … After four long years I felt like an overworked clerk, always under obligation to do what I was told rather than having a genuine curiosity over any subject … I was more robot than human.”
As was expected, but with little enthusiasm, Stone enrolled at Yale University, where high achievement was expected of him. “It was bred into my bones. American life is geared to upward motion; the only response to adversity I knew was, ‘Never Give Up. Never. Never. Never’.”
But Stone did give up, negotiating a year off, much to his father’s disappointment. He took a job as an English teacher for a
Catholic Church group in Saigon. After six months, Stone resigned and spent the next year travelling around Southeast Asia and serving a stint as a seaman, cleaning out engines on a ship bound back to America.
Emboldened by these glimpses of a very different world from the one in which he’d been raised, Stone did not return to Yale when he got home but threw himself into the writing of a 1,400-page, stream-of-consciousness novel that was eventually rejected for publication, leaving its author adrift and depressed. Looking for some larger meaning to make sense of his life, the 20-year-old Stone decided to volunteer for service in Vietnam — “the war of my generation”.
It was an experience that would indelibly shape his life and plant a seed of distrust of official versions and a belief in the idea that, rather than being the paragon of democratic values and freedom, the US was a nation built on lies intended to drug its citizens into acceptance and unquestioning unconsciousness. As Stone writes, from the vantage point of over half a century later, “I didn’t really wake up until I was 30 years old — in 1976 … I was darkened. A part of me had gone numb there … died, in Vietnam, murdered.”
LEARNING TO LOOK
After two tours of duty in Vietnam, Stone returned to the US, married his first wife Najwa Sarkis, and enrolled on the GI Bill at NYU’s Film School, where he studied screenwriting and directing and was lectured by a young, filmobsessed recent graduate, now lecturer named Martin Scorsese. Stone was also greatly influenced by a course in Greek drama, taught by one Timothy Leahy. He remembers Leahy telling them to rethink the ordinary and find the myth behind it. “He inspired me to reexamine my own experiences with that in mind.” Out of that came the initial idea for Platoon , written when Stone was 30, in the wake of the death of his grandmother at whose coffin he vowed to “do something with my life”. Platoon tells the story of a young Vietnam soldier who finds himself struggling with the two very different beliefs of a pair of platoon leaders in the jungle — one, Barnes, committed to the cause of the US by any means necessary. The other, Elias, is a more aware, disaffected but better American who realises the futility of the war and the lies on which it’s predicated. I speak to Stone the day after the first Trump/Biden debate, and when I suggest that these two visions of his homeland are still battling it out almost 40 years later, he enthusiastically agrees, “It’s just unbelievable to me that people still don’t see that. It’s exactly the same — red and blue, the same red and blue states — that was going on in Vietnam and that’s still going on today. It’s the same civil war … last night at the debate, here’s one guy yelling, ‘Law and order, law and order!’ It’s the same story over and over again. The guys who yell, ‘Law and order!’ are the guys who break the law first, like Nixon.” It was on the back of the script for Platoon that Stone began his career in late-’70s New Hollywood, but it would take him another decade to get the film made. Along the way, he won his first Oscar for the screenplay for Alan Parker’s Midnight Express in 1979; wrote the screenplay for Brian De Palma’s 1983 pop culture classic Scarface ; watched as director John Milius and producer Dino De Laurentiis butchered his script for Conan the Barbarian; and shook his head in resignation as Michael Cimino performed a similarly depressing operation on his story for Year of the Dragon. During these years, Stone developed and kicked a cocaine habit, divorced his first wife and married his second, Elizabeth Cox, and welcomed his first child, Sean. He also met a gonzo journalist named Richard Boyle, whose tales about the results of US Cold-Warera political interference in the small central American country of El Salvador fascinated him. Together Boyle and Stone wrote a script and managed to secure tenuous funding from a British production company for the filming of what would become Stone’s comeback film, Salvador , shot in Mexico in 1985 in uncertain, skin-of-the-teeth circumstances that were not made easier by the prima donna madness of the film’s star James Woods, or the threatening financial concerns and machinations of the producers. Stone says he “got toughened up on Salvador so much that [by the time it came to making Platoon ] nothing could stop me”. When the book ends with Stone being handed the Best Director Oscar for Platoon by Elizabeth Taylor — “the fantasy doll from my youth” — you have to agree with the director’s assertion that perhaps that was the best moment of his life.
“To have a film that had been rejected so many times and looked down upon … ending up as the Oscar winner and a big moneymaker … it’s all too much. God, you gotta celebrate the moment and it was a lifetime moment.”
In spite of his long struggle to get there and the many projects that were either mangled by others or never saw the light of day, Stone’s memoir is mostly surprisingly free of bitterness or acrimony — either towards his former collaborators, his parents or his ex-wives. That may have something to do with the fact that, since 1992, he’s been a devotee of Buddhist philosophy and principles, but it’s also, Stone thinks, due to what he learnt from his parents.
“I do owe a lot to my mother — she was extremely optimistic, she was a lover of nature and animals and people. She was no intellectual, that’s for sure, she never much really cared about history or literature or the things that I worshipped but she really did convey a spirit of optimism, and that’s the best thing you can do for your child.
“My father was both — he was more sardonic and far more intelligent in some ways, intellectually certainly, and sometimes saw the darker side of things,” he says.
There’s also the fact that, as Stone sees it now but couldn’t always then, that he was raised with love — in the beginnings of his life. “I was raised with love and then I lost the sense of it for a while and I talk about that in my first marriage — not knowing what love was but recognising the absence of love, and that’s important and that leads to the next book — what love is and how it moves the world.”
A RIGHT TO BE POLITICAL
As to the future of his country, Stone believes recent developments like Black Lives Matter and protests against Trump may signal that the US is beginning to have a long overdue conversation about the realities of its past and their effects on its present.
It’s a past that, according to him, has been lied about, mythologised, “so that’s a good thing, a cleaning out”. But he cautions that they have a long way to go.
“We’re still worshipping the military without thinking; we’re involving ourselves in foreign affairs without thinking; and we think we have the right to dominate … to tell anybody what to do, I don’t get that. It’s what we do — we use our money to bully. It’s a sense of privilege and I’ve seen it all my life here — in the George Bushes, in the Donald Trumps — this sense that we have the right to tell other people what to do.”
For now, Stone has no plans for a film about Trump although he’s sure that there will be many made soon. “Some will be good ones — but it certainly doesn’t need me.”
Instead, he’s focused on a new documentary about applicable ways for science to deal with climate change and a long wished “legacy piece”, detailing the developments that have emerged around the Kennedy assassination since he made JFK in 1991.
“You shouldn’t be asking me if I’m political,” he says. “You should be saying it’s a normal thing to be because, in my mind, artists should have the right to say what they think about anything in the world and should be allowed to go far and wide. But it doesn’t seem to be allowable in our society. I got away with it a few times … but I haven’t got much encouragement since then. In fact, it’s a continual problem — to be labelled a political filmmaker as if the only reason you’re making films is to send a message. Hardly so. I want to entertain. I want to make a film that’s involving, and I happen to think that politics can be very involving, but it’s not like I want everyone to be a Leftist and jump on my bandwagon.”
With that, Stone hangs up and returns to his lifelong project of chasing the light in all its messy, sometimes blinding, but always revealing rays.